Which makes me think of it would be prudent for the government or military to invest in this tech as well. Companies like Northrop Grumman while being bureaucratic nightmares, take safety pretty seriously.
The urban challenge could very well be the best thing to ever come out of DARPA. Riding in the OshKosh truck going around some actual roads in rough conditions is when autonomous cars became "real" to me. In relatively little time they had it going down roads in the woods and driving at high speeds within a few feet of a fence. Now that truck seems clunky and primitive in comparison even just against what Tesla is doing on production cars just 10 years later. Autonomous cars in another 10 years time still feels like a pipedream but then again I would have thought the same thing about where we are today 10 years ago.
Started? The Wikipedia page you mention says ”Fully autonomous vehicles have been an international pursuit for many years, from endeavors in Japan (starting in 1977)”, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars lists attempts going back to the 1930s (1920s, if you take ‘radio controlled’ as a form of autonomy)
The first DARPA grand challenge was announced in 2002 and held in 2004.
The theory is that the chain of effect that led to where we are today with autonomous vehicle development began with the Big Bang, but it's generally agreed that the current development paradigm crystalized through the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004, 2005 and the Darpa Urban challenge in 2007, though we also owe a great deal to deep learning, which Google didn't utilize in Autonomous vehicles until 2014.
They are.[1] Oskosh offers a system which allows a convoy to consist mostly of unmanned vehicles. The manned vehicle is usually at the rear and armored. The others can be regular Army trucks.
They're self-driving, but supervised by one operator for the whole convoy.
Oskosh had an experimental version in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and they had something more or less usable by 2010.
DoD never really went for it. That concept may reach deployment in some future form, but this version doesn't seem to be worth fielding.
